Tired of trawling through a plethora of pictures and notes to find your guitar pedal settings after the knobs have been knocked in transit? Fed up of your tone being tweaked by people playing through your pedalboard, and having to spend hours recreating your sound?
If so, this new app is sure to pique your interest.
Knobs.AI is a mobile smartphone app that promises to make these problems a thing of the past by utilizing artificial intelligence to help you record and save the settings of your prized pedals in the event of any unwanted tweaks.
The app can also store your settings alongside recorded audio clips, allowing you to create a bank of pedal settings that can be put into customizable categories courtesy of a Settings Group function.
In practice, the intelligent app uses artificial intelligence – more specifically, Computer Vision – to analyze pictures of your pedals and generate a computerized collection of virtual knobs that mirror your settings.
Although it is said to be "very precise", these virtual knobs can be further tweaked in the event of any imperfections. See the artificial intelligence in action below.
As well as helping you save your settings, the app also lets you explore hundreds of other pedals that have been uploaded by fellow KnobsAI users. Not only will this expose you to new pedals that you may not have heard of before, it will also let you see how other players are using the same pedals in different ways.
Although KnobsAI says sharing is caring, users can also remain anonymous if they wish to keep their secret settings to themselves.
Speaking to the Pedal Echoes podcast, creator of KnobsAI Jose Del Valle revealed that initial development of the app came from his own desire to keep track of his pedal settings.
Having become accustomed to taking notes on his phone and taking pictures of his pedals, Del Valle searched for something to help streamline the process.
Upon realizing that such help wasn't available, he set about developing an app himself.
"At first, it was just about storing the pedal settings, but then I started developing the idea a little further," Del Valle explains. "I thought it would be nice to use AI to be able to detect those settings from a picture and generate a physical representation of the pedal."
Del Valle goes on to say, "I hope it is a useful tool for everyone, both professionals and people who are learning to play. I really want the app to create a community – I want people to use it not only to save their settings but also discover new guitar pedals, or just learn how other people use the same pedals they have.
"It's kind of like an Instagram for guitar pedals."
Available in both free and Pro versions, the former has a five-pedal limit and features ads, whereas the latter has unlimited storage, no ads, and exclusively includes the Setting Groups feature.
Knobs.AI is available to download for iOS and Android now, and currently has over 800 registered users with more than 500 pedal settings.
For more info, visit Knobs.AI.
